Mad Men's America: A tribute to the Times Square Howard Johnson's

The loss of the Times Square Howard Johnson’s remains a sore spot. I never quite got over it. It had stood sentinel at the corner of Broadway and West 46th Street from 1959 until July 9, 2005, and the building lingered, its signage largely intact, for a few more years. 

But I feared the last day for years – it was obvious well before 2005 that this place was endangered. When sitting inside, or sauntering by, it always struck me how out of place HoJo’s had become, like the last townhouse holdout on a block whose owners refused to let the developer buy them out for a skyscraper.

But inevitably, market forces undid HoJo’s, and the building was sold in a multimillion-dollar deal that led to what’s there today, a massive ode to Times Square retail: American Eagle Outfitters.

Welcome to Day 3 of Howard Johnson’s week at The Retrologist, inspired by Sunday’s episode of “Mad Men.” The Drapers, as you probably know by now, visited a now-closed Howard Johnson’s in upstate Plattsburgh. I have visited two of the three remaining HoJo’s – there were once thousands. Check out my visit to the Lake George location HERE and the Lake Placid restaurant HERE.  [The Plattsburgh location closed years ago, and the actual episode was filmed across the country in two locations, including a former Howard Johnson’s, near Los Angeles. Read my post HERE.]

Today, in Times Square, it’s hard to imagine what had come before. The photos here date from the early summer of 2005, right around the time HoJo’s closed. I wish I had taken more – see others’ work here – and that I had used a better camera (my Treo 650 smartphone was a wonder in 2005, but its camera wasn’t.) 

Still, these pixilated images preserve something extraordinary. After all, when you look back at it, it’s amazing that the Times Square HoJo’s lasted as long as it did.

With its remarkable neon signage that had a little mid-century Vegas in it, window signs touting “cocktail time” with “Your Host of Broadway,” and a shabby chic interior that was a riot of earth tones, wood paneling and funky terrazzo flooring, this corner of Times Square stridently defied gentrification, Disneyfication, and whatever other “fication” had transformed  the neighborhood in a dizzying decade of development.

It’s funny that the old Times Square’s last stand was not really a peep show or grindhouse, but a restaurant that represented traditional, all-American values.

I mean, it’s hard to get more vanilla (and 27 other flavors, including Orange Sherbet. Looking at you, Megan and Don Draper) than Howard Johnson’s. 

The HoJo’s attracted a true cross-section of New Yorkers and tourists amid a setting that only the design masters at “Mad Men” could convincingly re-create. (So I hope they do for a future episode!) 

I always felt like I was in a scene from 1969’s “Midnight Cowboy” when I came in here for a bite. (And I did, quite often. I somehow felt every purchase of a patty melt would help keep the place open just a little longer. It was my civic duty to eat here!)

Of all the photos on this page, the one just above was the hardest to take. After 46 years, HoJo’s had closed the night before. The doors were padlocked, and a simple, hand-written sign – on the back of a placemat, it seems – explained what had happened:

WE ARE CLOSED.